That looks just about rendered in-engine, so it's very likely it will be
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Elite Dangerous: Horizons |OT| Just scratching the surface
- Thread starter Anton Sugar
- Start date
That looks just about rendered in-engine, so it's very likely it will be
Oh, it is. It looked like one of the concept art drawings at first glance. That's good.
Dreams-Visions
Member
i wonder what the waiting line will be like with a finite number of "engineers" and thousands of commanders? I also wonder how it will be balanced such that doing jobs for engineers and their factions don't instantly invalidate all other factions and mission boards in the game. 2.1 will introduce the most powerful incentive the game has seen to date and could very well make doing bulletin board missions for anyone else just a waste of time.
Unless...well...what if part of building rep with the engineers is helping several smaller factions take over their XYZ systems? Like what if an Engineer straight up said,
"I'm not making you anything until ________ (pick a minor faction) in __________ system (pick a random system) is finally in power. When they are you can buy ____________ (super rare metal that only becomes available if said faction is in power) and bring it to me so that I can make your augmentations."
That could be pretty damn interesting because it suddenly gives you a reason to care about who's in power in _______ (RNG system selected by the persistent NPC and probably different from the system anyone else is assigned to influence) and encourages you to do a wide array of activities to get them in power. Deliveries, assassinations, donations, crime sweeps, even tipping the balance in a civil war Conflict Zone. And your reward for helping that random system faction? An Engineer just might make you a fancy new pink pulse laser. SOLD.
Unless...well...what if part of building rep with the engineers is helping several smaller factions take over their XYZ systems? Like what if an Engineer straight up said,
"I'm not making you anything until ________ (pick a minor faction) in __________ system (pick a random system) is finally in power. When they are you can buy ____________ (super rare metal that only becomes available if said faction is in power) and bring it to me so that I can make your augmentations."
That could be pretty damn interesting because it suddenly gives you a reason to care about who's in power in _______ (RNG system selected by the persistent NPC and probably different from the system anyone else is assigned to influence) and encourages you to do a wide array of activities to get them in power. Deliveries, assassinations, donations, crime sweeps, even tipping the balance in a civil war Conflict Zone. And your reward for helping that random system faction? An Engineer just might make you a fancy new pink pulse laser. SOLD.
I doubt it
if the 50 mil weekly salary and power-specific weapons and primastic shields dont cut it for me now, rainbow lasers aint exactly gonna make me give up my FREE ROAM across the galaxy
instead of providing incentives to persuade you into joining a power, which is what a lot of people don't like right now, they should put more effort into making the activities themselves worth engaging in, and specific powers with their own political alignments will ask you to maybe do less moral things; a player who might be under archon might be asked to do more criminal things, which in turn might not just be what that player is after, but also what they enjoy doing, and the rewards should somewhat be related to help them do it better.
If you want to be a pirate, and you find piracy fun, and the guy you're under runs a pirate ring, you'll maybe get stuff like faster cargo scanners and better interdictors; rewards that help you do better at what you enjoy doing, rather than just saying "we've got awesome shields, come join us so you can grind and do the same thing as all the other powers for our cause which you couldn't care less about".
You get people switching powers every 2 weeks after getting their imperial hammers/pack hounds/whatever, and it makes no difference to them. What's happening now is just the players have no reason to stay with anyone (and that doesn't mean players should be punished for doing so), a power should be something a player should want to stick to because of their playstyle and only out of their own volition. Of course, not everyone is a hardcore RPer, but what I'm trying to say is people already complain about the "grind" and having to wait 2 weeks for their shiny parts, and when they tried to make missions more complex (contacts, persistent NPCs, multi-stop missions) those only served to provide more confusion and tedium to the mission system. After trying them, all I could think was "Well, I'm not doing that again" - the same goes for some of my friends.
It's difficult to think of things that other games haven't already tried, your only incentive for anything should primarily be "fun", and any rewards should only serve to improve the experience of what you already like doing. Don't get me wrong, everyone has their own ideas, but whatever you said I was like "pls no" all the way through. That just sounds like a really long and tedious process just to get extra parts for your ship, and also the reason I'm not aligned to any powers - it just sounds like too much trouble for something I don't really like doing, I'd rather spend those 2 weeks doing what I want and getting nothing for it other than the joy of playing the game. People say they get interdicted enough by rival powers for it to be annoying, making even just flying for fun difficult, because of the way the game spawns NPCs.
Maybe you get a message in your contact tab one day, saying "I heard you're a pretty big explorer around these parts, I might be able to help with that" after some arbitrary exploration-related stat-check (such as farthest distance away from sol), and what do you know, this guy is good at making custom FSDs. He'll take half of your current rare moon rocks that you already own and a chunk of your credits for a slightly better version of your current FSD. (You won't have to pay much for your first time.) You're gonna think, wow, what else can I get from this guy? He's not gonna tell you anything, but you're gonna bet the more you explore, there might be some other stuff in his store - more power efficient vehicle bay perhaps? lighter thrusters? These are all not powerful enough to be pure upgrades, they'll have downsides too, but ultimately they're there for what you should already like doing. It doesn't even have to be FSD first, it could be anything that enables you to explore better, or to better tailor exploring to how you want it(more fuel scoop options that might not be directly better, but maybe faster scooping and more heat if you prefer speed over safety).
If you want weapon upgrades, word around space is you've gotten a good several hundred bounties under your belt; weapons expert dude guy might be interested in some business with you. You'll show him some bounty cards you've already got, and for those tickets, he'll hand you a power distributor that maybe lets you put 5 pips in wep, but only 3 in sys (maybe not that OP but you get the idea). You think, "Hey, this could be really useful for what I already do." Same thing as above happens, you'll think the more you fight, perhaps you'll get more things that help you play better.
I'm no game designer, and I won't say this is the perfect solution, as doing those things could just still feel like grinding, but I feel like it would make more sense than powers giving you random shit for some long-ass tasks you have no interest in. This way, you can invest in what you enjoy doing, and be able to keep doing it better, like a snowboarder buying better equipment, getting stuff custom made after he gets better and better at it, because he likes it. If you want to switch playstyles, you won't lose anything, but you'll have to start from scratch; that's not so bad, if you start exploring and decide you don't like it, it wouldn't matter much that you won't get all the cool explorer stuff. That said, it's not going to stop collectophiles from trying to get everything for the sake of it; that and people flying combat ships are probably going to want nicer FSDs (BUT maybe that could also be a reward for both combat pilots and explorers!)
Color lasers should probably just be free as a part of introductory to how the new content works imo
With the release of the Rift and the Vive I can see this happening sooner than later.
50 mil weekly salary hasn't cut it since it's just reinvested back into paying for the power cargo to get Rating 5 the next week.
Average # of commanders in one instance minus number of landing pads of the engineer's facility. That's the worst what you can expect to regularily encounter. Not accounting for the possibility of engineers providing no compelling equipment and being therefore possibly not as popular.
Seriously though, no shame on switching to solo for getting into a facility if it should turn out that things get crowded in open.
On another note, I've tried out the Planet Coaster alpha. That game has a whole lot of promise. Would love to have the modular building tools available to build my own Asteroid base in Elite - no matter which value that might have for the game mechanic.
I noticed that "Ploster" has a unified Frontier Launcher that also includes Elite as second game. Is that new?
Part of me wishes they would force people to play in open instead of ducking out for certain things, but at the same time, some things are a complete pain in the ass in open and solo and private absolutely need to stay around.Average # of commanders in one instance minus number of landing pads of the engineer's facility. That's the worst what you can expect to regularily encounter. Not accounting for the possibility of engineers providing no compelling equipment and being therefore possibly not as popular.
Seriously though, no shame on switching to solo for getting into a facility if it should turn out that things get crowded in open.
On another note, I've tried out the Planet Coaster alpha. That game has a whole lot of promise. Would love to have the modular building tools available to build my own Asteroid base in Elite - no matter which value that might have for the game mechanic.
I noticed that "Ploster" has a unified Frontier Launcher that also includes Elite as second game. Is that new?
Say you plan on doing criminal activity that you know will get you wanted, but you can't take on the players that have better equipment than you. You go solo and you're fine, the AI isn't smart enough to kill you.
Say you want to RES farm. You don't do that in open, you do it solo so the other players aren't taking your kills.
I really wish there were ways they could force more player interaction, or at the very least make it rewarding. PvP, even in conflict zones, is still not worth the risk compared to AI. It can be more fun, but the number of people willing to engage is fairly small, and the reward for them is probably even less than the AI, unless you are pirating and are able to threaten a player into dropping a big haul. It's certainly not any easy solution, or maybe no solution at all. Playing games like DayZ (in the Arma 2 mod's heyday) make me really crave player interactions in an open world like this.
I would like to see player faction/groups get into wars with each other.
That's a huge red flag right there, I'm afraid. You don't force players to use game mechanics they don't want to that have no benefits to them. You can promote it, but putting any pressure or obligation behind it will have the absolute opposite effect - players using that game mechanic less. Which may simply mean they won't play the game anymore.
I find the jealous obsession of "getting people into open" or "locking players into their mode" in some parts of Elite's communtiy pretty sad. Especially when it's coming from PvP oriented players. Why would people who enjoy some quiet trading, want to join "Open" for the "benefit" of having the chance to be shot on sight by people in combat ships against whom they cand even hope to defend themselves? Some traders may enjoy that, but those who don't won't enjoy it any more when they're forced to change a mode against their will.
To some extend, I would even blame the game for this reluctance of players to join "Open". The means of interaction between players are more or less limited to shooting each other, dropping and gobbling up homoeopathic doses of cargo for each other (with pretty much the only application being role play or giving noobs a leg-up), and shooting each other some more. Forming Wings so traders have an escort is pretty much gimped by the discrepancy between jump ranges of trading and pure combat ships.
Players who are effectively defenseless, but have highly valuable ships full of cargo to lose, whereas their attackers might have cheap combat vessels in comparison don't join the Open PvP environment as much? Well, color me surprised!
How about implementing meaningful means of player to player interaction beside shooting each other or running from attackers (building ship bridges for SRVs is not what I would call meaningful btw.) instead of wasting energy on forcing players to go into or stay in "Open"?
Don't get me wrong here, I know why forcing people into Open is a terrible idea, but sometimes there are reasons I would want it. Probably most of them is because of how the game is not as well designed. The way it is now, it just feels "cheap" (for lack of a better word) because people just game the system of re-instancing between solo and open play. Example? Landing on an outpost. You are in open and you get to one and get that "Docking request denied" because it's full. You sit there for a minute, no one is leaving. So of course you just log out and then go back in and solo and then boom, there's space. Why don't they have it in open where any time a ship hits "Enter hangar" their ship disappears and is no longer occupying a slot on the outpost? It would cut down on a lot of frustration, especially in outposts that are popular. There are a decent amount of people that want to play in Open, but then have to switch because of stuff like that.
Are you doing Robigo runs and run out of smuggling missions? Just switch from Solo to open or vice versa depending on which you were in. I just don't like these dumb things that pretty much require gaming the system in a way like that.
I really wish they would change things where re-instancing isn't such a necessity, but I don't see that ever happening. I think it's really stupid that even in a Hazardous RES, you have to re-instance until you get the spawn table you want, when you have the possibility of getting Eagles, Asps, Couriers, and Vipers or straight up Clippers, Anacondas, Pythons, Dropships, Gunships, Assault Ships, etc. It should always be the latter for what should be the most difficult RES. The Eagles, Asp, Couriers, and Vipers don't have any noticeably smarter AI in Hazardous RES.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
So man, the Distant Worlds Expedition is now on the last leg of the voyage, we are making the trek across the outer rim to Beagle Point, one of the farthest systems in our galaxy from Sol:
I'm trying to get there tonight, but it's fully 10,000ly's out from Waypoint 22, and the star density is getting thinner and thinner....
I'm trying to get there tonight, but it's fully 10,000ly's out from Waypoint 22, and the star density is getting thinner and thinner....
This expedition has reached EVE levels for me. I really like reading about it and seeing you guys do your thing but can't imagine ever taking part of it personally. Which is a fucking shame. If exploration got some major love I'd be out there in a second.
I really want to get back into the game with a VR unit but there's no way I'm going to be an early adopter.
Pff, I love grinding for resources and finding the exact same life pods and caches on each and every planet. It really makes exploration exciting and worthwhile.
Pff, I love grinding for resources and finding the exact same life pods and caches on each and every planet. It really makes exploration exciting and worthwhile.
Please, it hurts.
Black holes and planets with unique features that you find far out from civilization are pretty cool though.
I don't know what it is about it, but for some reason I find driving my SRV around chasing resources is fun, even if it's frequently on the same planet.
But pointing and scanning is such a good mechanic, it's riveting and gives you a reason to get close to and land on planets.
I'll stop here, it's making me doubt other games like No Man's Sky now
Have any of you explorers scanned systems in a nebula that hasn't already been scanned? That's something I noticed while out there, all of the cool looking nebulas seemed to already be tagged.
I'm expect No Man's Sky will have to deal with very similar issues. Probabaly far less pronounced, but still present. The most common things their procgen creates may be known/discovered relatively quickly. From there onward exploration may be more of a repetitive task. They do however have alien life forms, both sentient and as animals with whom players can interact. That adds at least the "be chased by space goats and space T-Rex" and "learn alien language and do stuff with them" features, which Elite currently lacks. A seemingly far more robust resource farming system on top of that and the mileage for exploration focused players may easily trump that of Elite.
Apart from making the underlying mechanic possibly more challenging and compelling (that's just one possible idea), could you describe some concrete changes and additions that would make exploration compelling to you, rather than the point'n'scan we currently have? As I said in that post, I have a hard time coming up with things we can realistally expect to improve exploration.
With luck, you'll find one or two planets in a Nebula that haven't been scanned. There being few if any of those just shows to me how POIs attract more attention than the "ordinary" void.
They can't predict how long a player will be in the hangar or in the outpost and for what purpose. To those players, being taken from the instance while they've been sitting there, possibly chatting with some other players in the station would impact their game's consistency far more negatively than a simple mode switch would impact those who want to dock, but can't due to a full station. I don't see a more elegant solution for this issue. Other than possibly putting players entering normal flight at a station into new instances, if the existing ones are nearly full. That would only be technically possible if they have the capability to request such specific information from existing instances. If the backend doesn't keep track of these information constantly (it just might not, because that's based on "heuristics" and very specific in game information), requesting that to make an instancing decision may result in overly long loading transitions.
He.
I find that stupid as well and would suggest the opportunity to "re-roll" the mission board while you're in an instance - possibly for some credits - as a good workaround. And/or they have to make the generated missions persist through modes for each player if they don't want players to stack missions or to rely on re-rolling them. Preventing stacking would impact the profit of certain activities severly however. I just like the re-roll idea.Agree, that's a moronic mechanic. I'll attribute it to some hair raisingly stupid RNG mechanics they somehow seem to like using. This is for me in the same vein as randomly spawned mission targets and I would even consider them design-anti-patterns. The game has unfortunately quiet a few. I've pondered making a rant in their forums before, but it would've become overly lengthy and time consuming. Anyway, I don't have anything against RNG if the possibly outcomes are more or less equally compelling to the player. Taking these RES sites as example: I wouldn't mind RNG if the the resulting ship combinations were equally profitable and challenging in terms of bounties. Variations might be realized by using different sets of ships. E.g. mostly imperial ships, from their Eagle to the Cutter. Justifications could be that imperial factions are attacking the system or that some specific pirate crew is raiding it, with according ship markins, skins and variety. But as you say, the RNG currently descides between profit or wasting your time. Which will of course have people gaming the system. Being presented with "worthless" bounties by means of a bloody dice roll while you could make millions if only the dice roll had been differently hardly makes the world more dynamic and believable.
On that note, I frequently think people who propose a chance of mis-jump with varying results need their heads washed. Who thinks that is a good idea? You make a hyper jump and some bloody dice determines if you end up 100ly from where you wanted to be or possibly even if your ship breaks down. Surely, everyone who happens to be at the receiving end of the RNG god would rejoice due to the compelling and convincing extra game time they spend trotting back to where they wanted to be, having had to repair their ship first. They certainly wouldn't be grumpy for their wasted time. *rollseyes*
Surface samples, logs from past explorers that lead to something, modules of testing equipment, maybe even inflatable labs in orbit or on surface. Giving the explorer a reason to go down to the surface and even return with some artifact or sample etc. I'd also include some sort of beacon relay system as a utility slot where you can deploy a bunch of mini satellites or beacons between X amount of LY for a connection back to a station to turn in research etc. The burden isn't on us to make the game more compelling for them. Anyone on that team can come up with SOMETHING better than what's there.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
I agree exploration could use some love. For most of us on the DWE, and myself included, that really doesn't matter though, as we simply love exploration for the sake of it. We don't do it primarily for game credits or for material stuff, we do it to hunt for those picturesque places that few have ever seen before. We drive around in our SRV's simply for the fun of racing through a canyon and trying to survive jumping a huge chasm. We trek to far off stars simply to put our names on them and claim "first" for being there.
Exploration in Elite isn't for everyone, it certainly takes a special kind of commander to enjoy it as it is now in the game.
There are two things they could add to the game to really improve exploration quickly:
1. add exploration missions
2. add exploration focused POI's on planet surfaces in deep space, things to scan and cargo to pick up, stuff that would be super valuable to incentivize exploration more
There are other things too of course but those two would help tremendously.
Burny said:
Once you get out from the bubble about 10,000 ly's or so it starts getting easy to find nebulas that are mostly unclaimed. Many of the procedural nebulas in the western side of the galaxy have yet to be touched by anyone. That's why I'm heading home from Beagle Point by circumnavigating the galaxy counter clockwise.
Speaking of Beagle Point, after almost three months of flying I finally made it to the last waypoint of the Distant Worlds Expedition last night, CEECKIA ZQ-L C24-0, which before jumponium was the furthest known reachable system from Sol in the galaxy! 65,279 ly's from Earth:
Tonight I'm going to do some prospecting around the area and see if I can get a little farther out by using FSD boosts!
I'd say it's not a mechanic at all, it just happens to be there and FD are too lazy to do anything about it; all they've said is it's against the spirit of the game. I'd rather they just made them more standardized so they're not as crappy as they could be, but also the same spawn pool for the next hour or so once the instance is created; same goes for bulletin boards.
I mean, yeah, I'm agreeing with you in that the whole thing is dumb. If you don't like the people you see in a store, you can't just walk out and walk back in to get different people, it just cheapens the rest of the sim experience for the sake of min-maxing. I just believe It's more of an exploit than something FD expects you to do in order to progress.
I honestly don't think anything like that will ever be in the game, it would be like a story mode for Minecraft (I know, it exists kinda) or Space Engineers; ultimately I feel like it would be development time wasted when they could be adding more to the rest of the game.
Dreams-Visions
Member
Elite #2, down.
3rd and final Elite will likely be CQC. Hoping the VR influx will add more CQC players to beat up on.
~$4 billion in cash & assets? Something like that.
DV aka Uncle Scrooge aka Grampa Moneybags aka The Liege
Also, for some reason the game deleted my $17 million bounty. I guess it fell off after a period of not reviving its dormant state. I'm pretty salty about that as I was hoping to let a new GAFer kill me for a nice payday. I guess I'll have to do another gold drop give-away instead. Which is fine too.
3rd and final Elite will likely be CQC. Hoping the VR influx will add more CQC players to beat up on.
~$4 billion in cash & assets? Something like that.
DV aka Uncle Scrooge aka Grampa Moneybags aka The Liege
Also, for some reason the game deleted my $17 million bounty. I guess it fell off after a period of not reviving its dormant state. I'm pretty salty about that as I was hoping to let a new GAFer kill me for a nice payday. I guess I'll have to do another gold drop give-away instead. Which is fine too.
Holy shit, congrats. I'm Deadly 6% in Combat, it takes forever to make that thing go up.
Dreams-Visions
Member
Yea it does. I think I hit Elite right around 10,500 ship kills. That was my first Elite rank, which I got in maybe September. Trade secured yesterday.
Pro tip: if a ship is not ranked as Dangerous or higher, you get very little if any "experience" for the kill. Think about it like being a level 24 character in Dota killing a random lane creep. That shit barely budges. You need to kill higher ranked opponents to get meaningful XP. Same principle applies in ED. Look for Dangerous/Deadly/Elite or find a better instance.
Conflict zones are also pretty ok for increasing rank as I recall. But yea...look at you statistics panel and see how many combat kills you have. You'll be close once you hit 10,000. You won't get it before that.
--
Anyway, as a reward for hitting Elite, I decided to treat myself to a Imperial Hammer-based Imperial Courier. Money doesn't matter anymore so everything will be configured and tuned to maximize fun, as fun builds and efficient builds for farming continue to be distinct and exclusive concepts in ED. That means no more pulse configurations unless I'm doing PvP in a wing and the situation calls for it. I think most of my near-future builds will feature rails, beams, PA's and frags with rare exception. Weapons that I could never really fit into builds because of the inefficient heat or the impact limited ammo has on farming efficiency and your ability to stay in a good instance.
Might also become a Fuel Rat. I enjoy helping noobs. I think last week was 100% my last week of helping ALD as well. I don't need the money and every ship I wanted Hammers on has them. Without those carrots, there is no motivating factor to stay. 20 weeks of loyalty was good for she and I, though. Onto what as far as PowerPlay goes, I don't know. Maybe back to Aisling. Prismatics are always useful on some build. Or maybe Patreus to get those Advance PA's. Or whoever had the Disruptor Pulses. I always did want to try 4 of those on a FdL. Seems like it would have been a great load out for a ship in a PvP wing to limit the effectiveness of Silent running shieldless builds if you can randomly make subsystems fail.
Oh and welcome to all the Rift owners who are about to jump in. Uncle Scrooge will have something for you this week.
RadioactiveLobster
Member
I am so far behind the Distant Worlds fleet. I missed almost a full month of playing due to real life.
I don't think it's possible for me to catch up at this point.
I don't think it's possible for me to catch up at this point.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Probably not, next week is Beagle Point week, and that's the official "end". There is a second slower fleet with the FGE explorers who are only about half way I think, and won't be arriving at Beagle for months yet.
I plan on being around the Far Rim for at least a few weeks before making my way over to the western side of the galaxy.
Of all those things, surface samples and "science modules" are probably the most realistic thing you could expect in the near future if they were to start implementing them now. Labs, beacons etc. all require some form of player build structures, which the game incidentally doesn't have and which would be most likely major season material in terms of complexity. Those features are in the same vein as building your own base.
The burden of implementing game features isn't. The "burden" of saying what you actually want in a useful manner is however. Exploration isn't a game crashing bug, asking for it to be improved can mean absolutely everything unless you specify it any further.
The latter would probably require the former, wouldn't it? Those seem like realistic features, but whoever doesn't like exploration now wouldn't like it all that much more if there were missions asking to find the 100th lost ship or to scan two black holes. It would be nice for those who already enjoy exploring.
Weren't they already kicking around the idea of inflatable bases or storage somewhere? You don't need base building mechanics etc.
The thing is we already have. The DDF and a long list of threads and posts have already done so. Not sure why you keep insisting we need to continue pushing, it's on Frontier to actually listen and implement. The need and requests have been there for over a year now.
In the context of crafted equipment iirc. That could just mean you have a location bound inventory in existing stations. Player placed labs/satellites/bases are a much more complex topic.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
It's very strange out here on the Far Rim, on the edge of the galaxy 65,000ly's from Earth. There are very few stars in the sky out here, you mostly see black void with far off galaxies popping out in the distance. And the Milky Way looks so far away and dense. On the dark side of planets, away from their parent stars, the largest source of light in the night sky is the distant glow of the Milky Way itself.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
So I spent tonight trying to get as far away from Sol as I can, even further out than the 65,297ly's that Beagle Point is. It took a lot of work, a few jumponium boosted jumps coupled with some normal star hops, and this is the best distance I've gotten so far:
65,427 ly's from Sol !!!!! Looking at the galaxy map I think I can get farther if I travel a bit away from Beagle first, although I'm not certain my Asp can reach those even with level 3 FSD boosts. I'm gonna need to prospect for some more jump mats first though, I burned through quite a few tonight!
65,427 ly's from Sol !!!!! Looking at the galaxy map I think I can get farther if I travel a bit away from Beagle first, although I'm not certain my Asp can reach those even with level 3 FSD boosts. I'm gonna need to prospect for some more jump mats first though, I burned through quite a few tonight!
Elite basically needs more structured content - and more structured ways to find the content that's already there.
In essence, this boils down to having 'quest line' indicators that tell the player what to do and when. These quest lines can be procedurally generated - but essentially the missions should be multi-part, involving multiple tasks of different types, taking into consideration player assets and skill level (i.e. don't send the player to do a big trading run if they only have an eagle).
Additionally, they need to work on their war/combat event generator. Have more ship types (or at least more ship roles involving existing ship types), with AI been used to dynamically fill the gaps. Mission types like blow this station up, or infiltrate and scan, etc. Traditional space sim tropes you know?
Those missions should also be part of the procedurally generated content.
In other words, the game needs to cater towards structured players that don't thrive on simply exploring a free form universe.
In the long term, giving the player more ability to interact with and influence the universe is an important way for extending value. The apperance of playerbase agency is what Eve has in spades and Elite lacks completely. That is, the playerbase in Eve appears to be able to significantly influence the flow of the game (even though on any individual player basis they have very little ability to do so), while Elite appears to rigidly expect players to conform to the universe as constructed, with few visible feedback mechanisms for change (and even when change does occur through player agency, the results are superficial at best).
This must absolutely include the ability to create and control large scale structures and form larger alliances.
In essence, this boils down to having 'quest line' indicators that tell the player what to do and when. These quest lines can be procedurally generated - but essentially the missions should be multi-part, involving multiple tasks of different types, taking into consideration player assets and skill level (i.e. don't send the player to do a big trading run if they only have an eagle).
Additionally, they need to work on their war/combat event generator. Have more ship types (or at least more ship roles involving existing ship types), with AI been used to dynamically fill the gaps. Mission types like blow this station up, or infiltrate and scan, etc. Traditional space sim tropes you know?
Those missions should also be part of the procedurally generated content.
In other words, the game needs to cater towards structured players that don't thrive on simply exploring a free form universe.
In the long term, giving the player more ability to interact with and influence the universe is an important way for extending value. The apperance of playerbase agency is what Eve has in spades and Elite lacks completely. That is, the playerbase in Eve appears to be able to significantly influence the flow of the game (even though on any individual player basis they have very little ability to do so), while Elite appears to rigidly expect players to conform to the universe as constructed, with few visible feedback mechanisms for change (and even when change does occur through player agency, the results are superficial at best).
This must absolutely include the ability to create and control large scale structures and form larger alliances.
My shields were down on my FDL with about 75% hull left, and was messing with repairing stuff with my AFM, suddenly this Anaconda comes out of nowhere and just rams me and I die instantly.
Luckily I didn't lose much in bounties, but still, fuck that stupid shit. All because the AI fly like complete and total idiots.
Luckily I didn't lose much in bounties, but still, fuck that stupid shit. All because the AI fly like complete and total idiots.
Whitebison
Member
I'm waiting for a season pass sale to pick up Horizons but no luck so far...
frontieruk
Member
Thank you, I had seen that site before but couldn't remember what it was called.
Anton Sugar
Member
Braben tweeted that Saitek dropped this off at their office:
ED-themed HOTAS?
ED-themed HOTAS?
Seems to be the new X-56, their page even lists ED twice under supported games...
http://www.saitek.com/uk/prod/x56.html
Anton Sugar
Member
Oh, nice. Didn't even notice it said X-56, thought it was a custom X-55.
Felix Lighter
Member
That analog stick on the throttle is a huge improvement to the X55. Now that I have one on my throttle, I don't know how I went without it.
Dreams-Visions
Member
yes. the analog stick on the CH throttle is like...a big deal. Good to see other systems are figuring that out. Considering how long the CH Products system has been on the market, you'd think a little competitive analysis would have revealed the usefulness of such a feature years ago.
About time another company started putting in analogue sticks into their hardware, CH has only been doing it for 15+ years.
Shit, beaten by Dreams.
Dreams-Visions
Member
haha. now if Saitek can nail the whole "reliability" thing they will have a defacto market leader.